I was browsing edits, and I noticed a change from sed to SED. This came in parallel with a change from awk to AWK. I follow the capitalization of AWK. Not sure that I agree, but AWK is an acronym for the authors' names and is capitalized when referring to the language. However, sed is not an acronym. It's an abbreviation of stream editor. If anything, I'd write it SEd.
In both cases though, the real use of the terms there is as Unix commands. The Unix commands are written in lower case. If you tried to write them in upper case, they probably wouldn't work. Unix is case sensitive. Only probably because someone could have created a link or alias
to make it work.
If I were writing that phrase, I would have written it "grep
, sed
, or awk
" or maybe "grep
or sed
(or awk
)". The backticks would indicate that I was using it in a coding way, almost like a function. Because this would be referring to the commands, I would use lower case for each.
Note: I tagged this specific-question and editing because it was an edit to a specific question that brought this to my attention. But my main concern is the standard. When I post, am I supposed to be following some standard? If so, is it stated more generally somewhere?